Learning to play guitar with a metronome.

One thing that is common in today’s worship culture is running tracks during worship. If you find yourself on a worship team that uses tracks you will definitely have metronome in your ears. The metronome (or click track) is used to keep everyone on the same tempo. It’s a very important skill to learn, playing to a metronome. In the Worship Guitar for Beginners course, we use metronomes often. We also encourage the use of a metronome anytime you pick up your guitar to practice chords, progressions, or songs. Learning to play in time will be a very useful skill if you ever decide you want to join your church worship team. So let’s talk briefly about metronomes and how to use them. For this example, I will be showing pictures of my app metronome called MetroTimer.

Most of the time you will need a time signature of 4/4. Most metronomes will have the ability to change the time signature in the settings. Does your song you’re playing require you to count to 4 or 6? If you’re counting to 6 you will, most likely, need to set your metronome to 6/8. Take a look at these pictures below to see the difference in 4/4 and 6/8 on the MetroTimer app.

These pictures show the difference between 4/4 and 6/8 time.

At slower tempos, you may want an eighth note click while you practice.

This means you will hear a click on the down and up beats. All metronomes will be a bit different but the quarter note and eighth note symbols will be the same. Take a look at these two pictures to see the difference between a quarter note and eighth note.

Metronomes will also have a beats per minute (BPM) counter in them. This is where you set your tempo to your song you’re playing or progression you’re working on. The BPM on MetroTimer looks like this.

So there you go! A quick guide to metronomes and how to set them up so you’re practicing your guitar with the best chance of success! As always, if you have any questions about metronomes please don’t hesitate to reach to us here at Multiply Worship.